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A Last Night Among the Spirits at the Chelsea Hotel

Kitty Ramona played bass guitar Saturday night in her room at the Chelsea Hotel. She drove up from Baltimore as soon as she heard it was closing to guests.Credit
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

Her head was shaved on both sides, her Mohawk bleached and dyed blond and blue. As she leaned over the front desk of the Chelsea Hotel on Saturday night, her lower lip pierced with a ring and her Doc Martens tapping the floor, Kitty Ramona, a bass player from Baltimore, was every bit the nostalgic punk girl seeking refuge in a place dripping with history and on the verge of being swallowed by time.

Saturday night was, by all indications, the last night that the Chelsea Hotel on West 23rd Street would be open to guests, though the duration of the closing, the first in its history, was unknown.

The building is to be sold for over $80 million to the developer Joseph Chetrit, though the deal had not closed as of Sunday, according to someone close to the matter, who asked not to be named because the negotiations were confidential. Extensive renovations are expected to take at least a year. The hotel’s 100 permanent residents will be allowed to stay, but they have been told nothing beyond what the startled hotel workers learned late last week: that all reservations after Saturday were canceled.

“Where are all the punk kids? Maybe they don’t know,” said Ms. Ramona, an adrenaline-fueled, self-described “forever teenager” (in her early 30s) who had booked a room, hopped in her car and gunned it to New York City as soon as she heard the news. For a decade, Ms. Ramona has journeyed to the hotel several times a year, drawn by two of its famous guests from decades past. “Sid Vicious in caps, and Dee Dee Ramone,” she said. “If I could be anywhere tonight, this is the place to be.”

Mr. Chetrit, who did not return calls for comment, is said to want to keep the Chelsea as a hotel, but the plans are unclear. The building, a looming Queen Anne that opened as a co-op in 1884, is landmarked.

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Tenants gathered Saturday at an "end of an era" party hosted by Tony Notarberardino, who has lived in the hotel for 17 years.Credit
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

Gene Kaufman, an architect hired to oversee the renovations, said the plumbing, ventilation and electrical systems and the lobby all had to be overhauled, but added that much of the hotel’s original charm, including the wrought-iron interior stairwell and the art, would be preserved. “People should not be nervous about that,” he said.

But residents are nervous. The hotel has been owned by the same families since World War II. Scott Griffin, head of the tenants’ association, said he believed that the goal of the hotel’s two controlling shareholders was not to maximize profits but to empty the building.

“This is one of the greatest cases of corporate mismanagement,” Mr. Griffin said. Several shareholders, among them Marlene Krauss, the target of much resident vilification, either did not return messages or declined to comment.

Part of the allure of the Chelsea, beyond the creepy yet tantalizing feeling that the place is thick with spirits, is that from the inside looking out, New York can still feel gritty. Its cavelike hallways are lined with paintings, striking collages and old electrical wiring caked with innumerable coats of paint. A palpable heaviness lingers, especially in the first-floor room where Nancy Spungen was staying with her boyfriend, Sid Vicious, when she was stabbed to death in 1978. Artists, photographers, composers and producers still live there, making the place part art colony, part living museum.

Residents say the hotel’s character shifted irrevocably after its lionized former manager and part-owner, Stanley Bard, was ousted by the hotel’s board of directors four years ago. Mr. Bard had acted as curator, deciding who got to stay and how much would be paid, and overseeing the hotel during the days when the likes of Bob Dylan, Patti Smith, Janis Joplin, Leonard Cohen and Robert Crumb roamed its halls. Residents said the hotel’s occupancy and room rates had suffered since Mr. Bard’s departure, with celebrities and artists replaced by budget tourists.

But most tenants lamented the departure of the guests. “It’s kind of fun to have this influx of people, even if you’re making fun of them,” said Meli Pennington, a makeup artist who has lived at the Chelsea with her husband for 16 years.

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The Chelsea Hotel, a New York landmark on West 23rd Street.Credit
Julie Glassberg for The New York Times

On Saturday, though, apart from crestfallen guests whose stays had been abruptly cut short, the goings-on at the Chelsea were, by its standards, relatively standard.

Wide-eyed tourists snapped photos of the lobby as residents swept past them without a glance. Steve Johnson, 29, visiting from North Carolina with his cousin, sat in the lobby gravely recounting the time he said he was approached in his room by a ghost. Gabriel Marchisio, a Uruguayan tarot card reader and hotel fixture, lingered by the front desk dispatching, for the heck of it, his signature “muah ha ha ha” monster laugh.

Shortly before dusk, police officers rushed in and up to the ninth floor. A guest had gotten into a fight with his girlfriend and called his mother to tell her he wanted to kill himself; his mother called the police, who in turn escorted the man to Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric ward. “Never a dull moment,” a front-desk clerk said.

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In the rooms above, people partied, prowled and slept. Hip-hop blared from Sid and Nancy’s old room. Hotel guests held earnest, drunken conversations from the balconies overlooking West 23rd Street. Ms. Ramona combed the halls with her camera. Tony Notarberardino, a photographer who has lived at the Chelsea for 17 years, hosted an “end of an era” party in an attempt to cheer everyone up. He scattered white rose petals near the entryway of his sixth-floor apartment, which is choked with chandeliers, beaded lamps, red walls and gilt-edged mirrors and feels like a speakeasy crossed with an opium den. “Let’s celebrate what we had,” he said, “and embrace change.”

Sometime before dawn, someone drove a fist through a swinging door on the first floor, leaving a wide penumbra of shattered glass. A worker discovered it in the morning.

“Already,” he said sadly, “they’re destroying the place.”

A version of this article appears in print on August 1, 2011, on Page A15 of the New York edition with the headline: A Last Night Among the Spirits. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe